Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic

Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-0-521-85461-0
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 262 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 581 g

How the Romans came to have a literature, how that literature reflected native and foreign impulses, and how it formed a legacy for subsequent generations have become central questions in the cultural history of the Republic. Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic examines the problem of Rome's literary development by shifting attention from Rome's writers to its readers. The literature we traditionally call 'early' is seen to be a product less of the mid-Republic, when poetic texts began to circulate, than of the late Republic, when they were systematically collected, canonized, and put to new social and artistic uses. Imposing on texts the name and function of literature was often a retrospective activity. This book explores the development of this literary sensibility from the Romans' early interest in epic and drama, through the invention of satire and the eventual enshrining of books in the public collections that became important to Horace and Ovid.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Goldberg, Sander M.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Lateinische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. The Muse arrives; 2. Becoming literature; 3. Comedy at work; 4. Dido's furies; 5. Enter satire; 6. Roman helicon.

Über Autor(innen)

Goldberg, Sander M.
Sander M. Goldberg is professor of classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. The author of The Making of Meander's Comedy, Understanding Terence, and Epic in Republican Rome, he has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright-Hays Commission.